Gracie unwrapped the fabric, revealing the meat, before she slowly stood up and backed away. The entire pack of dogs watched her. When she’d retreated far enough, the alpha took a tentative step towards the package. The others waited.
William’s heart pounded, tension turning through him. Even Olga kept her mouth shut. And a good job. Their chance to run had passed.
The lead dog sniffed the meat, tasted it with a lick, and then bit into it, pinning it with one of its enormous paws so it could tear a chunk free. As it backed off, chewing the deer meat, its dark eyes flitted from Gracie to the others while the rest of the pack piled in. A free-for-all, they fought one another for their chance at a meal.
Captivated by the feeding frenzy, the mass of densely packed bodies writhing, twisting, and competing with one another, it took for Gracie to hiss, “Come on,” for William to see she’d retrieved her spear and knife and had moved to the far wall of the tunnel. “Let’s get moving before they run out of food and we become more interesting to them again.”
If any of the group had objections, they kept them to themselves. William led them after Gracie, Matilda directly behind him.
The dirty wall of the dark tunnel on their right, the group made their way past the pack on their left. The stones sloped away from the track. The angle proved difficult to walk along, the ground shifting beneath their steps. One or two of the dogs raised their heads. A small brown and black scruffy mutt watched them the entire way. The least threatening of the lot, yet it had the confidence of a lion.
The dogs snarled and growled with in-fighting as they scrapped to get their chance to eat. One or two of them yipped and pulled back. A snap of jaws. A loud bark. But they soon returned to the feast.
With the dogs behind them, Gracie quickened their pace.
Olga had been waiting for this moment. She said, “What the fuck—”
“Sing a different tune, Olga,” Max said.
“Although,” Matilda said, “she has a point. Gracie?”
The ginger girl turned to the group.
“What the hell was that all about?” Matilda said. “You could have given us a warning.”
“If I gave you a warning for everything we might encounter in this city, we would have needed to stay in the ruined house for another week to cover it all.”
Matilda shrugged. “So what was that about?”
“Dogs,” Gracie said. When none of the group replied, she said, “Wild dogs live in these tunnels. They’re mostly fine.”
“Mostly?” Artan said.
“Look, would you rather take your chances with a pack of dogs who can be tamed, or the diseased?”
“It’s a choice?” Hawk this time.
“It is. We don’t know why, but the diseased don’t like dogs. I mean, there are anomalies, but from what we’ve witnessed, they do what they can to avoid them. The very few that make it down here without killing themselves on the metal stairs try to get back out again the second they realise they have to share this space with dogs.”
Hawk shook his spear. “The enemy of my enemy …”
“Exactly,” Gracie said. “And they’re quite sweet, really. We call the alpha Rocky.”
“You’ve named it?” Olga said.
Gracie sighed. “Him. And what did you expect? That he’d name himself? You don’t know much about dogs, do you, sweetie?”
Olga bit down on her bottom lip and raised her middle finger at Gracie.
Gracie led them around the next bend. “This is a platform,” she said. A walkway similar to the one they’d seen at the other end, but no train this time. She laid her spear on the platform and used both hands to boost herself up. She reached back down and offered William a hand so he could follow. “It’s where the people used to wait for the trains to arrive.”
Between them, William and Gracie gave a hand up to everyone who wanted it. All of them, save Olga, who scrambled up by herself. Any dignity she’d hoped to retain slipped away with her kicking legs, her slithering on her belly, and her grunting as she dragged herself to her feet.
This journey mirrored the one down there. A different station, but they ducked through another archway and came to another flight of metal stairs leading up away from them. Another mound of broken, diseased bodies gathered at the bottom. Their foul reek tainted the air with the same acrid tang. Palpable, it clung to William’s sweating skin and weaved into the fabric of his clothes.
They crossed the decomposing diseased one step at a time, testing their footing before they committed. William’s knuckles ached with how tightly he gripped Jezebel. How did they know all the diseased in this pile were deceased?
The steep climb up the metal stairs pulled on the back of William’s tired legs.
A red-faced and sweating Olga took up the rear. She reached the top of the stairs last. Gracie hovered nearby.
When Olga stepped clear, she said, “You didn’t have to wait for me.”
“I did.” Gracie reached a hand down the side of the stairs, winced as she buried her arm deep into the metal frame, and, after a few seconds of searching around, turned the lights off with a click!
The darkness gave the moon its chance to shine again. A splash of silver light leaked down from the streets above, highlighting the small flight of stairs out of there. Once again, Gracie led the way.
William caught up to Gracie before she left the station and said, “Why did we go through there? Why not just go overground?”
“A pack of dogs isn’t a big risk. Especially when you have cooked deer meat for them. We’re almost certain to avoid the diseased for that section of our journey if we go the way we did,
